MANCHESTER: England needs to move on from its Ashes obsession and start to focus on new goals like improving its “consistently woeful” record in the one-day game, English cricket chief Andrew Strauss said on Monday.

“We probably define our sense of worth too much by winning and losing Ashes series,” said Strauss, who was hired as England’s director of cricket in May.

Test matches against Australia remain the pinnacle of cricket in England, which regained the urn this summer after the third Ashes series in two years. That’s often to the detriment of the limited-overs formats, with England having never won the 50-over Cricket World Cup — or even reached the semifinals of the tournament since being runner-up in 1992.

England is currently losing 2-0 to Australia in the tour-ending ODI series, which has failed to capture the public’s imagination like the Ashes.

“We need a fundamentally different focus on white ball cricket, one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket,” Strauss said at the SoccerEx conference in Manchester, “because the game has been so geared towards test cricket for decades and we’ve been consistently woeful in World Cups.

“It’s an issue we have in this country that the ODIs feel like after the Lord Mayor’s show.”

The recent hiring of Trevor Bayliss, who has enjoyed success in limited-overs cricket with Sri Lanka, as England coach could go some way to addressing the issue. As could a proposed revamp of English domestic cricket that would see the number of four-day County Championship matches cut to enable white-ball cricket to be played at the height of the summer months.

That is when pitches are at their best, allowing teams to produce an aggressive brand of cricket needed to challenge in global tournaments. The next Cricket World Cup will be held in England in 2019.

“I look at 2019 as an unbelievable opportunity to refocus and reshape the game in this country but it’s also incredibly difficult because our game is not set up to do that,” Strauss said. “The game is evolving unbelievably quickly and T20 is exploding around the world and we can’t afford to be left behind.”

One player who is set to be left behind by England is Kevin Pietersen.

Strauss said in May that England’s all-time leading run-scorer across all formats was not part of the country’s short-term plans, and England’s latest Ashes win seems to have ended any chances of a recall for Pietersen.

“I think the team has moved on,” Strauss said, “and the team is in a pretty good place.”

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2015

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